Last Words. William S. Burroughs

      Dr. Senseney was a terrible doctor. Nearly killed me on a tonsil operation, flushed with an uneventful removal of adenoids, which I kept in alcohol in a jar next to a 6-inch centipede from under a rock in New Mexico, Valley Ranch, and my horse was named Grant. A Strawberry Roan. And the band played on. And I came near bleeding to death from his bungling hands.

      “I did all I could” says he, and that was certainly no lie.

      But I come of good stock and can survive the ineptitude of a socialite puff[ed]-shirt croaker (a sort of bladder with a face on it).

      Cut his throat with my Scout knife and dragged him around the block behind my Red Bug three times.

      “He molested met!” I sobbed.

      And that was no lie, with his story about bringing a French fairy back to his digs. It was raining and cold:

      “Then I knocked him into the gutter and slammed the door.”

      Yes, he sure was molesting me.

      “Why if any son of mine, or any friend of mine, turned that way, I’d kill him with my own hands.”

      At this point I was molested, so I couldn’t contain myself, kicked him in his nuts, and was on him with the shiv and all he could do was let out a squawk like a stricken turkey.

      What all day? And so much negative Karma.

      December 29?—30?, 1996

      I was locked out of my apartment. The janitor with a pass key was Cabell Hardy on the 3rd floor.

      (Found his letter today and immediately answered. Should have done before, but I did not register. The dream nudged me—gracias Allah.)

      A little restaurant with one waitress. Somehow my gun was checked with her, and there were these two cops there (like Mexico). One had a harelip and looked like Big Al in the Beat Hotel (nostalgia hits me—the Beaux Arts Restaurant, the Balkan, Brion’s room).

      It is not certain they are or are not there to arrest me.

      Outside is a dock (short and in ruins), deep blue water. Fish down there.

      Reading New Yorker article about Hiroshima:

      “Once, like everyone else, I thought the bomb had ended the war and saved many lives.”

      Include me out of your “everyone else.” The war was already won. Japan was asking for peace through Sweden. It was obvious official USA were and are such shits as boggles a sane and relatively decent mind.

      You see, they wanted a “virgin” target. Enough blood on that sheet to satisfy the bloody lot of you.

      “Thank God it wasn’t a dud,” said Oppenheimer.

      “We are become [Death], destroyer of worlds.”

      “Most perfect aiming point I’Ve seen in this whole damn war,” said Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the (Ebola) Enola Gay that dropped it.

      “Shadow left by a Japanese idler as he waited on the stone steps of a bank that never opened.”

      “Clock stopped at 8:15 A.M.”

      Gets worse and worse. The Ugly American keeps on getting uglier, until there is no uglier image what can be got.

      And what is that final point? The ultimate F.U.?

      Well now, of course you’re a woman—I understand these things. I am a man of the world, my little short rib.

      December 30, 1996

      Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.

      What is left in these minds? Very little of value to me or anyone I can relate to. “All my relations,” as the Indians say. Like the drug anti’s in Malaysia say: “dealers are not human to him.”

      And he—Mohathir Mohamed, Prime Minister—is not human to me. I curse him with my whole heart. There is nothing in him I feel for, or with.

      Same goes for the firestorm impresarios.

      So as this inglorious chapter in the USA draws to a dreary close with Clinton squeaking like the rat he turned out to be, that [in] Arizona and California together courts [are] quasi-legalizing marijuana for medical or any other purpose. ...

      You must mark it to its place. It is an ILLEGAL drug and by illegal, beyond question.

      Tuesday, December 31, 1996.

      I will start my auto—

      you know—

      If he—

      Then I felt the touch of a higher power and I became a morphine addict. Best thing I ever did for myself. Without God’s Own Medicine I could well have ended up one of those “Write the Great American Novel” [types] that never get off the ground, or an alcoholic academic:

      “Will he get tenure? Will he break up with his lover of ten years?”

      It is one tired soap opera and thanks to G.O.M. I didn’t slip on it.

      “Will he get tenure? Will the bank approve his application for a second mortgage? Should he make (risk) a pass at young Prescott, in violation of his own rule?”

      He will write the Great American Novel someday, simply dripping with “high seriousness,” that will pose and probe momentous questions.

      In Egyptian hieroglyphs the idea of “question” is reeds and water.

      The touch (nudge) of God’s Own Medicine led me to Junky,[to] Naked Lunch, to finding a vacation—I mean, of course, vocation. A place in life. My place in life—and it opened my eyes to the evil that lurks behind the war against drugs. Illegal drugs. Not just any drugs. Once a drug becomes illegal, it acquires a sulfurous glow from the depths of Hell.

      So through G.O.M. I gained self-respect—and in so doing, the respect of others.

      I am an unabashed cultural Icon. I stand for the truth. I hate liars.

      My familiar is the White Cat, formed of searing white moonlight under which all hidden plots, all lies and deceits, are brought to the light of The Hunting Cat. He can’t be bought. Stack it to the ceiling. He can’t be scared. He is light right through. Fear is deviousness. We march under the banner of The Hunting Cat.

      What I mean by truth: I mean what is there when all the bullshit is gone. Not one lie left. All gone away.

      And what, if anything, remains is TRUTH and consequences.

      “I didn’t mean—”

      “Hell, I gotta big mouth, what would happen to me if I lost it—”

      Good Old Boy. These are unsightly tricks.

      “It has happened. You have lost it.”

      The day of the liar is done.

      Truth is here when all the words are rubbed out. Words were made to lie with.

      (“I will go and laugh with my wife.”)

      Wherever that come from it was there.

      Now, brothers and sisters, this is not done quick or easy. You find one lie in yourself and shove it out, and three more quicker than him come in. It’s something you have to do every day, every hour, every second.

      Trace down those lies. The White Cat will do the rest. The Hunting Cat.

      We are—and by “we” I mean [we] who are sick of lies and bullshit—

      Clinton—what a wrong